Cybersecurity: Trends & Threats

Public Risk Management

On this week’s PRIMA episode Eugene Kipniss and Ben Spear will discuss 2017 cybersecurity trends and threats public risk professionals should be aware of to protect their entities. Eugene is a program specialist for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) for their internet security and Ben Spear is a senior intelligence analyst at MS-ISAC. What to expect in 2017? Internet Security with common household items and every day items connected to the internet seemed to be a top of concern of MS-ISAC’s twitter followers after doing a non-scientific poll ie smart TVS, routers, devices that most all come with little to no security features and usually default passwords that are rarely changed by its users which can easily be compromised and used to ‘cyber attack’ other devices within a home. In regards to your business these same devices can be used to pivot into other secure and sensitive areas within your entity. As an organization you have most likely had internet devices within the workplace for several years: printers, teleconference hardware and certain billing admin systems all run with embedded software. Simple security measures – changing default passwords, segmented those systems away from the internet if there is no business needs can be done to protect your entity from intentional and unintentional devices that are brought into your workplace. Be aware of open source data dumps which have been used to attack other accounts within your entity. A seemingly easy security measure but often not taken into account is individuals having more than one password for their accounts. Usually a malicious cyber attack will find a person’s password(s) and attempt to use that same information elsewhere as well as sell it online to other cyber attackers.